Was Your College Major The Biggest Waste Of Money Ever?

You already know that college is expensive. In fact, a lot of you are yikes.still paying off your student loans (and even more of you may be paying those off for a really long time). But two certain college majors may be a lot more expensive over time than others.

You guessed it: One of these is art. Somewhat more disheartening, the other is education. (Seriously, teachers probably deserve a lot better than this. Except my sixth grade teacher who lied to my parents and said I was “getting in with a bad crowd,” and my third grade teacher who always sent me out in the hallway for no reason then asked me to teach the class for her when she got lazy, because they were the worst.)

The Atlantic reports that depending on where you study and what you major in, college may earn you even less money than just sticking with a high school diploma based on the poor return on investment for tuition costs. Check out this PayScale study results below:

That means that if you majored in art at Murray State University, you’ll make $197,000 less than if you didn’t go to college at all. And, uh, yikes.

Further, regardless of what you major in, these schools showed the worst return on investment in general:

On the bright side, there are a few caveats to this study, as The Atlantic notes. For one, it looks over the past two decades and isn’t necessarily predicting the future. The second chart listed in particular may not be quite as damning as it could be, especially if those schools expanded programs for in-demand, high-paying fields like engineering.

Another reason to take this with a grain of salt? PayScale got their data from self-reported income … and as a proud nation, we’re often liable to lie about how much money we really make. Of course, then that may mean that the latter chart isn’t even as bad as it could be … but who wants to think about that?